Telecommunications service entities, e.g., MCI, AT&T, Sprint, and the like, presently provide for the presentation and dissemination of customer account and network data management information to their customers predominantly by enabling customers (clients) to directly dial-up, e.g., via a modem, to the entity's application servers to access their account information, or, alternatively, via dedicated communication lines, e.g., ISDN, T-1, etc., enabling account information requests to be initiated through their computer workstation running, for example, a Windows-based graphical user interface. The requests are processed by the entity's application servers, which retrieves the requested customer information, e.g., from one or more databases, processes and formats the information for downloading to the client's computer workstation.
Some types of data, e.g., “unpriced” call detail data pertains to a customer's telecommunications traffic, i.e., number usage. This type of data is provided in near real-time, and is used by network managers to make business decisions regarding their telecommunications networks. As an example, the assignee telecommunications carrier MCI Corporation provides an MCI ServiceView (“MSV”) product line for its business customers which includes several client-server based data management applications. One of these applications, referred to as “TrafficView”, provides network traffic analysis/monitor information as provided from an MCI TrafficView server. Particularly, with respect to MCI's TrafficView system, customers are provided with unpriced call detail data, e.g., relating to their toll free networks.
The current TrafficView architecture is organized primarily as a batch midrange-based server data delivery mechanism with the data being typically “canned” delivered at pre-determined times with predetermined formats. Additional trending, analysis, and data management functionality is maintained by the customers in workstation-based software provided to customers for installation at customer sites on their PCS.
While effective for its purpose, the current data management and presentation architecture are limited in that reports generated are of a narrow view, and are delivered at predetermined times with predetermined formats. These prior art reporting systems do not enable the generation of ad-hoc reports. Moreover, legacy platforms containing reporting data are reaching the architectural limits of scalability in terms of the total customers they can support, total online data they can present, total historical data they can keep and type and number of applications they can support. This simply is not sufficient for an increasing number of customers who, to remain competitive, are required to have updated and real-time access to their data to enable them to make their critical business decisions quicker. Moreover, there are a variety of independent data management tools and legacy reporting systems having disparate systems and infrastructures providing little or no cross application interoperability and data sharing, thus, requiring customers to use separate applications to gain access to their data.
It would thus be highly desirable to provide a data management product that is a Web-based (Internet and Intranet) client-server application for providing customers with information relating to their telecommunications network traffic and usage in a variety of detailed report formats.
It would additionally be highly desirable to provide a Web-based (Internet and Intranet) data management tool having a Web-based client-server application which provides expedient and secure data access and reporting services to customers in real-time, from any web browser on any computer workstation anywhere in the world.